Gisaenchung
Bong Joon-ho (2019)
The main characters of Parasite may be a nuclear family but their circumstances instantly mark them out as a singular screen household. Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) and their twentysomething children – son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and daughter Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) – share a cramped, semi-basement apartment in the bowels of a present-day South Korean city, presumably Seoul. The hovel’s décor, such as it is, reveals that Chung-sook was once a medal-winning hammer-thrower. Ki-taek has started up a succession of businesses, all of which have gone bust. The whole family is now out of work, except for earning a few pennies folding boxes for a local pizzeria (their meagre wages are docked when they fail, as they often do, to fold the boxes correctly). To access wi-fi, Ki-woo and Ki-jeong and their phones crouch beside the window, cheek by jowl with the family toilet. When the street outside is being fumigated, Ki-jeong wants to close the window. Her father, mindful of the ‘stink bugs’ infesting their home, says to keep it open – ‘we’ll get free extermination’.
Whereas Ki-woo repeatedly failed his university entrance exam, his boyhood friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) has a degree and is preparing for further study abroad. As a parting gift, he presents to Ki-woo’s family what Min-hyuk describes as a ‘scholar’s rock’ – a hefty good luck charm, reputed to guarantee wealth for whoever owns it. Min-hyuk also has a practical suggestion to get the Kims started on the road to riches. He has been teaching English to the daughter of a wealthy family in the city. He encourages Ki-woo to pose as a university student and take over the tutoring job. Ki-woo follows his friend’s advice and the ruse works. It does indeed mark the start of a change in the Kims’ economic fortunes.
The English pupil is Da-hye (Jeong Ji-so), the late-teenage daughter of successful businessman Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and his wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). Their younger son, the eccentric Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun), is ‘an artist by nature’, according to his mother, but he goes through art therapists like loaves of bread. Ki-woo tells his new employer he may know just the person to take on the role – a classmate of his cousin. In fact, she’s his sister. Ki-jeong accompanies Ki-woo on his next visit to the Park mansion. Before ringing the doorbell, she checks with her brother the outline of the script she’s learned: ‘Jessica, only child – Chicago, Illinois – classmate of your cousin’. Just as she calls herself Jessica, so Ki-woo, in his dealings with the rich family, gives himself the name Kevin. Park Dong-ik styles himself professionally as Nathan Park: a poster advertising his international business success announces ‘Nathan Park on Central Park’. I assume these (and other) Anglo-American details in Parasite are a form of social one-upmanship, easily understood as such by Korean audiences. (I’m only guessing but the film’s interesting music may reflect the same idea in a different register. The composer Jung Jae-il is Korean but the elegant melancholy of the score suggests a pastiche of western music.)
Ki-jeong too is soon a fixture on the premises along with her brother. He is soon in a secret relationship with Da-hye, who isn’t much of a student but fancies her tutor. The Parks’ affluent lifestyle includes a chauffeur and a live-in housekeeper but the incumbents don’t last much longer. Ki-jeong leaves a pair of her knickers in the car, enough for the Parks to assume the chauffeur (Park Geun-rok) has been having casual sex in the vehicle, and to fire him. He’s replaced by Ki-taek, also working to a script devised by Ki-woo. The housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), requires more sophisticated character assassination. The Kims exploit her allergy to peaches and, with the help of little sachets of blood-red sauce, convince Yeon-gyo that the housekeeper has tuberculosis and is a health risk. Moon-gwang moves out and Chung-sook moves in.
Bong Joon-ho describes the Kims’ infiltration of the Park household with a light, sure touch: from the word go, Parasite is briskly engaging. It’s also plainly self-aware. When he receives the fortune-bringing rock from his friend (and at a couple of other points in the first half of the story), Ki-woo exclaims, ‘That’s so metaphorical!’ Just what plenty of the audience – the arthouse audience, at any rate – will be thinking from the moment Bong introduces the impoverished family’s nearly subterranean living conditions. Bong is an established auteur whose six previous features (none of which I’ve seen) include some major commercial successes but this latest film has far outstripped its predecessors on all fronts. Ever since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and opened in South Korea, both in late May last year, Parasite has been receiving critical acclaim and awards, and making money, hand over fist. Deservedly so: as A O Scott wrote in the New York Times, this ‘aesthetically-energized movie … obliterates the tired distinctions between art films and popcorn movies’.
Up to the point at which all four Kims have a foot in the Parks’ door, Parasite seems a sharply satirical but reasonably straightforward social comedy, its plot propelled by the interaction of the complacent, gullible haves and the variously resourceful have-nots. (The title character is surely both the main families.) When the Parks go off on a camping trip for Da-song’s birthday and the Kims, in their absence, take up temporary residence in the mansion, the plot thickens and the mood darkens. Thunder rumbles outside – again, so metaphorical but it also presages the Parks’ premature return on account of widespread heavy rain that washes out their camping. In the meantime, there’s been another unexpected visitor to the property. The ex-housekeeper Moon-gwang turns up, explaining that, when she and the Parks parted company, she left something behind. Moon-gwang also looked after the place for its previous owner (an architect, who designed the house). She knows it inside out, better than the blithely oblivious Parks do. What Moon-gwang left behind was her husband, Geun-se (Park Myung-hoon). Like Ki-taek, Geun-se set up a business that failed. For the last four years, he’s been hiding from loan sharks in the Parks’ basement.
This revelation occurs about halfway through the film. In the second half, the narrative momentum continues to increase and the tone repeatedly changes. This never seems a false change of tone, so cleverly does Bong continue to seed his story’s alarming potential. Chung-sook receives a phone call from Yeon-gyo to let her know the Parks will be home in a few minutes – just time enough for the Kims frantically to conceal evidence of the mess they’ve made of the place and of Moon-gwang’s return to the premises, not time enough for father, son and daughter Kim to make their getaway.
This results in one of the film’s funniest bits. Da-song has a thing about all things American-Indian. He’s also just been given a walkie-talkie. In spite of the unrelenting torrential rain, he insists on spending the night in the garden, in his wigwam, maintaining radio contact with his parents indoors. They sleep, and make out, on a sofa that overlooks the garden; Ki-taek, his son and daughter hide under a nearby table. When they eventually manage to make their escape and return to their own dwelling, they find it flooded out. With the waters about to wash away Chung-sook’s hammer-throwing medal, her husband, who wanted the windows left open at the start, now yells for them to be closed.
What seemed an ironic economic fable has broadened into something more regretful and more garish. The former comes through first in the sequence in a gymnasium, where the Kim trio, along with many other families whose homes are flooded, spends the rest of the night. The regret comes through too in the increasingly oppressed face and bearing of Ki-taek, not only in the gymnasium but also at the party that the Parks, on the spur of the moment, decide to throw the following day. Parasite’s garish side comes through in its violence, which climaxes at this impromptu party.
The BBC arts editor Will Gompertz, though full of admiration in his online review, gives the film four stars rather than five because, in the closing stages, it ‘lurches into the melodramatic’. I assume Gompertz thinks the lurch occurs at the Parks’ garden party: in retrospect, I’ve fewer reservations about this climactic bloodbath than with the preceding mayhem inside the mansion. This starts with a fracas involving Moon-gwang, Geun-se and the Kims, when they first discover each other’s secrets (immediately before the Parks return home). It’s followed, just as the outdoor party is getting into full swing, in a kitchen confrontation between Ki-woo and Geun-se, whose wife has died as a result of what the Kims did to her. When Ki-woo offers the scholar’s rock by way of olive branch, Geun-se bludgeons him over the head with it. (That’s why it had to be so heavy.)
The violence in Parasite doesn’t come out of nowhere: it feels increasingly like a bomb waiting to go off. Yet the savagery, once it begins, isn’t only emphatic. It also has the effect of upping the brutal ante: the carnage in the garden has to top what’s gone before. After braining Ki-woo, Geun-se grabs a kitchen knife, stumbles out into the sunlight he hasn’t experienced in years and stabs Ki-jeong. Da-song passes out at the sight of this. After a struggle, Chun-sook impales Geun-se with a skewer. Dong-ik leans over the body of Geun-se and recoils at the smell. For Ki-taek, this is the last straw. Much earlier in the story, Da-song remarks that all four members of the Parks’ new staff have the same smell, and sniffs them in turn. There have been several subsequent references to, in particular, Ki-taek’s odour – ‘like an old radish’, Dong-ik jokes to his wife as they make love within earshot of Ki-taek, trapped in the same room and fearful his pong will give him away. It makes sense that Dong-ik’s reaction to the stink of a man who’s lived four years with no mod cons is what causes the humiliated Ki-taek to snap. He stabs Dong-ik fatally and flees the scene.
Although its impact would be even greater if the audience didn’t, by this stage, see violence as an essential, increasing element of the film’s style, this culminating havoc is brilliantly realised. Bong Joon-ho replicates the farce pace of the Kims’ efforts to clear the scene of incriminating evidence before the Parks’ return home; the same speed of action now reflects startling and engulfing disorder. What follows in Parasite is repeatedly disorienting. Kim-woo now, for the first time, starts to narrate the story in voiceover. He wakes in hospital after several days in a coma. There’s no lasting brain damage but his injuries have left a neurological legacy of involuntary laughter – a condition that naturally brings to mind a fellow-sufferer, the protagonist of Joker. Like the latter’s pseudobulbar affect, Kim-woo’s is no laughing matter. Unlike Arthur Fleck’s problem, Ki-woo’s is weirdly shocked out of his system by bad news, that his sister died of her stab wounds. The film’s closing minutes, which jump into the near future, concern Kim-woo’s attempts to find his father, still wanted for the murder of Dong-ik and supposedly on the run. The location of Ki-taek’s life in hiding comes as no surprise: he’s the new tenant of the bunker in the mansion, which is now owned by a German family. The final sequences switch poignantly between Ki-woo’s fantasy of family reunion and the reality of his afterlife.
I wouldn’t want to see Parasite again in a hurry but it is quite something. Song Kang-ho, one of South Korea’s leading actors, heads a top-notch ensemble cast. Bong may have drawn some inspiration from the real-life case of the French Papin sisters (also said to have inspired Jean Genet’s play The Maids and, thereby, Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie) but his screenplay, co-written by Han Jin-won, feels novel and is ingeniously constructed. The editor, Yang Jin-mo, has done a superlative job – so too Lee Ha-jun, the production designer who built the Park mansion for the film. The socioeconomic state of things that Bong dramatises, while it has a particular resonance in his own country, amounts to a broadside on global(ised) capitalism. Yet Parasite is a remarkable balancing act. Without making light of his weighty theme, Bong Joon-ho has crafted an exuberant entertainment.
3 February 2020
